The announcement today of plans to hold a competition to build a new garden city in England is to be welcomed. There is general political consensus around the need to build new towns and settlements to address the housing and population growth. David Cameron has expressed support for the principle of garden cities, as has Nick Clegg and as did Ed Miliband in his recent speech to Labour party conference.
According to a recent report published by the Building and Social Housing Foundation the population of England is growing. In 2001 it was 49m, rising to 53m in 2011. This was accompanied by a jump in the number of households from 20.5m to 22.1m, an increase of 158,000 households per year. This growth is projected to accelerate to 24.3m households by 2021 and rise by 221,000 households per year. We need more homes to deal with a chronic backlog of house building and this growth. The Future Homes Commission has called for 300,000 extra homes to be built every year in a ‘housing revolution’ and this concurs with the BSHF and Town and Country Planning Association.
The need for new homes is not disputed; the discussion now moves to where and how. Indisputably, the suggestion that new garden cities can be built sounds softer on the ear than new towns or estates. But what is a garden city?
The day before Ed Miliband’s speech, a Labour party conference fringe meeting debated ‘building real garden cities with community ownership’. The meeting heard how garden cities had been originally established as social projects that aimed to bring planning and architectural practice together, combining the best of town and country, but also in a cooperative theme to capture the rising land value for the good of the local community, not the crown or absent landlords. The theme of collective ownership is a strong part of the garden city ideal, is supported by the TCPA, and is one of the 12 principles in our book.
The founder of the garden city movement, Ebenezer Howard, believed that as investment went into the town and its infrastructure that the land values would subsequently increase. He called this the ‘unearned increment’ and, instead of this going to absent landlords, speculative investors, he was adamant that this should be captured for the local community and their benefit in perpetuity.
This may all sound idealistic until you look at Letchworth and see that the company he founded to control the town still exists (though in one of many new forms over the last 110 years). Today it controls assets worth £127m and makes an annual charitable spend of £7.5m. Not bad for a town of only 35,000 people.
Milton Keynes, though not a garden city, still adopted the principle of endowing the new town with assets. These assets, worth £20m in 1991 (now worth £84m), and 5,000 acres are controlled by a trust. They generate revenue which pays for the upkeep of the parks and green spaces (about 25 per cent of the city) in perpetuity so it doesn’t have to compete with the local council for funding.
Community ownership does work and the idea of endowing assets is also a key feature of the BSHF report.
The key is that garden cities are not to be places of charity and paternalism but as places of citizenship and empowerment. With community ownership in the form of a community land trust or community land bank this can be done and they will foster participation in both the planning, development and governance of the city. Such that people will call themselves citizens of the garden city an appellation derived through a sense of place or ownership. As Kate Henderson of the TCPA told the Today programme it is about ‘capturing land value’ and Simon Wolfson talked of the need to focus on governance too. It is governance, ownership and other issues that our tried and tested 12 principles focus on to define a real garden city.
As for the competition I hope that those in the cooperative movement and elsewhere can forge together to put in a proposal in for this competition or in general. In Scotland this is on the blocks with the proposals for Owens town.
The winning entrant should be about more than sleek urban design, green space and environmental sustainable. These are parts of the picture but not all. It needs to be also be socially and economically sustainable providing long time affordable homes and capturing the prosperity from the value of the land in perpetuity for good of the community.
I hope that all entrants will embrace the real ethos of a garden city in their entries to deliver the special ingredients that can turn houses, offices and factories into strong communities.
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Philip Ross is the former mayor of Letchworth Garden City and founder of the New Garden City Movement
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Photo: Steve Cadman